Authored by Eion Higgins via CommonDreams.org,
As President Donald Trump spent the early days of 2020 instigating and then backing down from a potentially catastrophic confrontation with Iran, corporate media in the U.S. turned to the very same people who promoted the country’s worst foreign policy disaster in a generation to advocate for repeating the mistakes of two decades ago.
The decision of networks and cable news outlets like CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News to bring on a stream of past advocates for and architects of the 2003 invasion of Iraq was panned by progressives who watched in horror and frustration as the same arguments were deployed in service of all-out war with Iran. “It’s War Inc. all over again,” tweeted The Nation‘s Dave Zirin.
Trump’s ordered assassination of Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani on January 3 proved the catalyst for escalated tensions between the U.S. and Iran. It also opened the door for news outlets to welcome back some of the key Bush-era war cheerleaders.
The more things change, the more they stay the same, wrote Rolling Stone‘s Tim Dickinson.
“The Trump administration’s sudden, violent confrontation with Iran stands in contrast to the methodical march to war with Iraq under George W. Bush and his neoconservative cabinet in 2003,” Dickinson wrote. “But the rhetoric around the two conflicts has been strikingly similar — as has the reliance on ‘razor thin’ evidence of an imminent threat to establish a cause for war.”
Soleimani’s death by drone strike was celebrated in real time by former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer, who spent the run-up to the Iraq War selling the public on the necessity of the conflict.
